Share your stories of complete and total overkill, Chunky salsa, red mist, etc... Options

[bibliophile20]

Okay, we've all done it or seen it done--those times when the runners decide to follow Rules #34 and #37 of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates: #34: If you're leaving scorch-marks, you need a bigger gun and #37: There is no “overkill�. There is only “open fire� and “I need to reload�. Invariably, these occasions are highly entertaining and happen often enough that there are terms for them: chunky salsa effect, red mist effect, standing empty boots effect, etc.

So, share your stories of the times when the runners decided that it wasn't enough to just kill their opponents, but that it was necessary to reduce them to bloody smears on the walls and floor and ceiling (bonus points will be given for especially humorous writeups).

[Critias]

Once, in the Arc, while traveling under an illusion spell to fit in, I left a grenade in an elevator as that elevator was filling up with Blues. Then we gave it about twenty seconds after the doors shut behind us, and I smiled cheerfully and used my headware radio to send a *boom* command.

You want to talk about a nice confined space for chunky salsa to come into play, an elevator's hard to beat.

[Kagetenshi]

I'm not sure elevators are really sturdy enough to provide a good basis for chunky salsa. Of course, when the floor or ceiling gives way, it generally doesn't matter so much how high the Power of the blast has gotten…

~J

[Pendaric]

My group needed to create a distraction for an exstraction in a hurry. Said exstraction being from within an arcology to save a friend.
So they had four remote mortars firing about six shots each into the building and the mage while inside said building used a great earth elemental to eathquake the place.
Needless to say the arcology needed to be rebuild and the death toll was high.

[kzt]

All I've got is the "room full of devil rats" and a frag grenade with airburst.

[Gelare]

My players had gotten to the basement of the research facility and had corpsec on their way. The sammie had manually disabled the elevator, in the sort of way you would expeect a sammie to, so corpsec had to come down the stairs. The players put a bunch of explosives in the stairwell and put a tripwire at the bottom. When corpsec charged in, poof, instant salsa. I was so proud of them.

Incidentally, two meter wide hallways are really conducive to chunky salsa effects. There was a horde of ghouls chasing the PC's through some building, and a couple PC's stop and toss grenades. The players were only too happy to help me calculate the amount of bouncing the shockwaves did.

[Stahlseele]

we as a group were once hired(as we later on figured out by some eco terrorists) to sabotage a sweets producing industrial complex . . we had one character with an built in chem skill of about 10 or 12 . . so we figured out what chemicals would do the biggest boom when combined and set up a small detonation charge on the right tanks . . we went in, shut down power grid, set up bombs, we went out . . all the while the GM is hinting something at our walking chem-sniffer . . we prepare to push the big red button(we made one) and he asks if we REALLY want to do that . . of course, we are players . . we wanna see things go boom . . so he lets us do it . . and reveals to our chem guy that some of the OTHER chemicals that were stored in said factory added together and with some heat would produce some nice nerve gas . . of course AFTER we blew it all up . . so, long story short . . 10 kilo of plastic made about as big a boom as a little tac nuke . . and killed everything in an 100 mile radius that was not in some way meant to withstand such things . . later on, after having fled the continent we happened upon a news item on that incident . . shown from sattelite photo was a large dark grey/brown patch in an otherwise more or less pretty green environment . . the casualties were some ten thousands to 100k i think . . and we even tried to keep casualties as low as possible on the factory staff x.x . .

[Wounded Ronin]

Every time my character uses an entire magazine from a rifle or pistol and has to reload in combat I count that as my victory.

[MaxHunter]

...Everytime my players use entire magazines of APDS rounds and have to reload in combat I count it as my victory...

Cheers,

Max

[It trolls!]

I once gave my players the job to convince a local gang of ~eight people to leave an abandoned building. Well, a few Molotov Cocktails and quite a lot of burnt corpses later...
This also included such things as one player's: "I fire a warning shot from my shotgun into his leg!"
*roll*
Me: "OK, you shot off his leg."
and the gunbunny adept instantly killing a ganger using gel ammo, aiming at his knee with a light pistol.

[KarmaInferno]

Once, we were tasked with taking out a guy in a limo.

There was the possibility that this guy was a high-rank initiate spellslinger, so we wanted to make EXTRA SURE he didn't survive beyond the initial ambush. None of us fancied an extended combat with that sort of power.

So we got the heaviest lift flying drone we could find, modified it to carry even more stuff, and built the world's largest shaped charge explosive into it, aimed straight down.

We then proceeded to stealth the drone in every way we could think of. Silnce, invisibility, radar masking, etc.

We waited til the guy in the limo was located, and then quietly sidled the drone over the limo when it was stopped at a traffic light.

We made a nice massive crater in the street. I think we actually managed to drill a hole all the way down to the sewer system below. Of course there was very little left of the limo or it's passengers.

Turns out the target was a mundane, and there was a clue for us waiting in his briefcase.

Oh well.


-karma

[mfb]

i've got a story about something that should have been overkill, but wasn't. during the pre-Arco stuff, we were meeting with Overwatch at the choco-tart factory and we got attacked by a team of Blues. my character popped out of the vat and saw two of them, one of which was pointing a rocket launcher at us. i won initiative and shot the rocket in the tube. apparently, a rocket going off next to his head wasn't enough to kill the guy with the launcher, much less the guy next to him.

[DireRadiant]

Overkill failure...

SR3 rampaging cyberzombie in the barrens, we track it down to a particular building it's hiding in. This being the second cyberzombie we encountered, the other took a zeppelin mounted railgun to take out, we decided to do whatever we could to take it out with as much bang as possible.

We wired the building with about 80 kilos of C12 to collapse, took positions in neighboring building with a barret sniper team.

We got a good shot, and blew up the building it was in.

It still managed to do a running jump across the street into our building and come after us.

[CircuitBoyBlue]

If someone can tell me how to add spoiler tags, I've got some stories about a certain well-known module involving an inhuman jackass that blew my SR veteran mind. The phrase "Take THAT, Debugging Section!" is now one of our in-house sayings

[Kagetenshi]

The spoiler tags are just that—spoiler and /spoiler, wrapped in square braces.

Was the inhuman jackass Dodger? Please tell me it was.

~J

[CircuitBoyBlue]

Thanks, Kagetenshi. If I were smart enough to figure out simple things like that, I'd probably have a girlfriend and a happy life, instead of being a civil servant with enough time on his hands to spend his work day reading DS.

And no, it was another inhuman jackass. Harlequin and Mercurial spoilers ahead!

[ Spoiler ]

In Harlequin, my character and one or two teammates got abducted by Ehran's goons and tortured in a basement. Like, hook through the cheeks tortured. Teeth ripped out with pliers tortured. Waterboarded. I'm guessing that last one wasn't in the module as written.

I can't remember whether we escaped or just got thrown back for being small fish, but we got out. And when we did, we got our drones. We'd been working on a project for the past many, many runs that involved having a small army of blimp and rotor drones (mostly blimp, as they're near undetectable and can stay in the same place for long, long times--but their intended purpose isn't as germain as the fact that they all had grenade launchers or heavy weapons attached, according to their size). We also loaded up the Dobermans and Steel Lynxes. And we got our armored Murder Wagon. And we all got drunk and rigged up a boat on the fly, and dubbed it the "USS Hobo" and christened it by smashing all the empties on the side, and forgetting that the cybertroll was the only one with the dermal plating necessary to outright ignore the broken glass, and we were sending him in on a bike.

But before all this descended on the house where we'd been tortured, our mortars went off, and we fired LOTS of rockets at the house. THEN everything converged. The decker/rigger character I was running went so far as to plow his beloved combat truck straight into the burning wreckage blindly, praying he didn't hit anything solid enough to stop him.

Do not think for a second, dear reader, that we were unaware of how much heat this would bring down, or that a subtler method would be more conducive to our survival. And we also had a conversation along these lines ahead of time:

Guy that missed the "torture" session: "Don't you think that maybe it was just a safe house they were using, and nobody's actually there?"
Me: "Safe house? SAFE house?!?!?! F*ck that! THAT house is the least safe place on this planet right now!!"
GM: "Could you rephrase that? Some of those words wouldn't come out correctly, what with the hole in your cheek, stitches in your tongue, and the missing teeth"

But of course we went in anyway. And yes, it was glorious. We blasted the whole thing into pieces too small for the drones to pick up on sensors, and then the cybertroll stepped on them a bunch, and then we went for another round of rocket/MG fire. On the way out, the inevitable helicopter retaliation happened, and permanently messed up the combat truck (like, for the rest of the campaign), and plenty of karma was burnt all around. Not a single fallen bad guy, and probably no important collateral damage other than the fact that Ehran maybe had to get a hotel next time he was in Seattle. But I killed the hell out of the chip on my shoulder.

At a different point in the Harlequin module, I bluffed my way into Ehran's poser followers' little clubhouse, and realized after the fact that I needed my cyberdeck. The other characters were too obviously not elves to pose their way in, so rather than some intricate ladder & window work, I called them on my cell phone and got them to send in the underground construction drone and pass the deck through the tunnel. How did we do this without waking everyone up, you ask? Easy--by waking everyone up ahead of time with a cybertroll firing a Vindicator at the front of the building to create a distraction. Some people would say the inability to be subtle is a liability in the running biz. I would agree with them, and then point out that my group was more akin to an adoptive family of sociopathic sadists on a quest to die. Also, the trick with the tunnelling drone worked like gangbusters, and we repeated the trick on many occasions. We even coined the term "gopherf*ck" to describe it. Best use of it ever was during the Maria Mercurial run, when rather than tow her all around the city dodging dragons and yaks, we just dug a huge tunnel in the ash dunes and hung out there (back then the earth was a living thing, and so blocked assensing attempts) until the deadline was up. Have you ever seen a GM just sigh and hand you the module book? I have. Take THAT, debugging section!

I edited this to put a comma where a comma was due.

[bofh]

Simple enough. The group left the Troll outside with instructions to shoot everyone coming out that wasn't a team mate.

The team went upstairs to try and retrieve the victim and met the kidnappers. A scream downstairs drew off one of the kidnappers to investigate. The guy at the front desk (an Elf) was seen by the Troll running out of the front door immediately followed by three mostly naked humans in shorts and painted up wielding knives and apparently chasing the Elf.

The Troll's thinking was "shoot the folks with weapons" and started picking off the humans. After the second shot, a human with a pair of pistols chases a fourth mostly naked human out the door and shoots into his back. The Troll, finding someone with more weapons, shoots the pistol wielding human.

In the mean time, the group has convinced the kidnappers there was a misunderstanding and were just reaching the front office. One of the kidnappers rushed over to the downed human and the Troll took another shot. The other two kidnappers started acting (weapons and spells). One got a burst into The Face's back and immediately got a shock into her back knocking her out. The mage, who thought she was in the back was surprised and had her brains blown out all over the runners. The kneeling human took a second shot from the Troll and fell over.

In the mean time, the hostage, being sprayed by blood and hearing shots, decided to dive through the front door to escape (the carnage at least). The Troll, still following orders takes him out as well.

When the dust settles, three of the semi-naked humans have limped off after being shot, two of them are face down and dead, three of the four kidnappers is dead as is the hostage. The fourth kidnapper is stunned. Lone Star is audible. The Troll is putting away the rifle. One of the runners finds the Elf under a car in the parking lot and drags him out. Two others snag the dead hostage and drag the corpse into one of the cars. The rest hop into their vehicle and make their escape, a few minutes later releasing the Elf to the street.

About 30 minutes before they checked out the site, they electroshocked a Lone Star officer.

Finally they took the body of the hostage back the guy who hired them, apologized for him being dead, and asked for a few extra Nuyen for their trouble.

They're setting up quite a backstory :D

Oh, and this was yesterday's run.

Carl

[martindv]

[ShadowDragon8685]

[Critias]

[mfb]

hey! my guy had shuriken, not some namby-pamby throwing knives.

[Mr. Man]

On the old forums there was a power armor thread in which someone posted the lengthy and highly amusing story of a dwarf in a suit of homemade power armor taking on the arcology. It included lines like "By the time we reached level such-and-such he had exhausted all of the rockets and drained the batteries on the lasers". Was it overkill? I won't reveal the ending in hope that the ensuing riots will bring back the old forum.

When they return this link should work:

http://jive.dumpshock.com/default/thread.j...arcology#219213

[ShadowDragon8685]

Was the armour orange? Did this dwarf have a goatee and a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses?

[Kagetenshi]

[Mr. Croup]